I've posted the third set of photos from my outing with a troupe of Philly photobloggers to Laurel Hill Cemetery, they are of some of the beautiful graves at the site.
My second set of photos [the second set of landscapes] included one shot of the sculpture/statue/grave that I really went there to find. It is of a mother and twins. I first read about it here and was determined to find it. I found it in the furthest south section of the cemetery on the riverside. From the site:
...The monument is a statue of a mother holding her infant twins. It was carved by her husband and the twins' father — a professional sculptor — and overlooks the spot on the Schuylkill River where the babies drowned. For years, cemetery guides believed the mother and her children died together in a boating accident. But cemetery records show the children were buried March 6, 1855. The mother was interred on July 27, 1857.
The husband and father was Henry Dmoghowski-Saunders (or Sanders), a Polish sculptor whose busts of Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski are on display in the U.S. Capitol. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the deaths and not much is known of the Polish sculptor, except that after finishing the sad monument he returned to Europe and never came back to America. Time and the elements have done much to erase the details of the marble monument. There are inscriptions on three sides of the base in Polish and English.
The most poignant of the inscriptions for me is this one:
WE LIVE IN DEEDS NOT YEARS
IN THOUGHTS NOT BREATH
IN FEELINGS NOT FIGURES ON A DIAL
WE SHOULD COUNT TIME BY HEART THROBS
HE MOST LIVES
WHO THINKS MOST
FEELS THE NOBLEST
ACTS THE BEST
My initial edit of sixty-one photos up in a flickr set.
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